For the last few months I’ve been working on the API for Artifact. I started out the project using ActiveModel::Serializers and chose collection+JSON as the media type. I wanted to give collection+json a try after using it at REST Fest 2015. This series of posts will show not why ActiveModel::Serializers is bad, but bad for what I tried using it for.
AMS + JSON API
ActiveModel::Serializer is heavily geared towards using JSON API. Because of this it feels like I’ve had to bend backwards to get it to do collection+json. You can see what I did in my Collection+JSON with ActiveModel::Serializers post.
I use and abuse the meta key in that post. Based on what I saw in the source code for ActiveModel::Serializer I don’t think I used the key as intended. While I misuse it, it was the only way I could find to get variables into the serializer from the render method.
Serializer Context
Another issue I ran across was trying to get general context inside of a serializer. ActiveModel::Serializer does current_user for you, extending this to include extra methods resulted in a fairly hacky monkey patch.
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
# Extend what the Serializer can see by injecting the
# current application.
def _render_with_renderer_json(resource, options)
options[:current_application] = current_application
super(resource, options)
end
end
This is what I added in order to push the current OAuth application inside of the serializer. I found this by browsing the source of ActiveModel::Serializer enough to finally see them do it for current_user. Inside of the serializer this is required:
def current_application
@instance_options[:current_application]
end
It took a good deal of poking around in order to figure out how to inject this extra context into the serializer.
Collection Serializers
Collection serializers are second citizens in ActiveModel::Serializers. With collection+json, everything is a collection. Every resource I have in Artifact has an item and a collection serializer. While writing the collection serializers you start to notice things that are missing in the ActiveModel::Serializer::ArraySerializer. A lot of the context isn’t present and you see missing method errors more than you would expect.
Implicit Resources
One thing that seems like a nice feature of ActiveModel::Serializers is automatically detecting the serializer class. In practice I rarely use this feature. I have started treating API endpoints as resources and typically create a special serializer for the one endpoint. I found that I don’t create just a BookSerializer and use it everywhere.
For example, in Artifact you can create a collection of books. For this I would create a CollectionBookSerializer because the URLs contained within will be different than just a BookSerializer. I would also need the associated collection serializers.
Given this here is how a typical controller method renders:
def index
render({
:json => books,
:each_serializer => CollectionBookSerializer,
:serializer => CollectionBooksSerializer,
:meta => { }, # "..."
})
end
I personally now prefer explicitly referring to a serializer I want to use on an endpoint.
Next Time
These are all fairly minor pain points, but it has recently gotten me to thinking how I can make it better. In the next post I’ll go over what I came up with.
